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FORUM Holocaust Scholarship and Politics in the Public Sphere: Reexamining the Causes, Consequences, and Controversy of the Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen Debate Central European History 50 (2017), 375–403. © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association, 2017 doi:10.1017/S0008938917000826 FORUM Holocaust Scholarship and Politics in the Public Sphere: Reexamining the Causes, Consequences, and Controversy of the Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen Debate A Forum with Gerrit Dworok, Richard J. Evans, Mary Fulbrook, Wendy Lower, A. Dirk Moses, Jeffrey K. Olick, and Timothy D. Snyder Annotated and with an Introduction by Andrew I. Port AST year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the so-called Historikerstreit (historians’ quarrel), as well as the twentieth anniversary of the lively debate sparked by the pub- Llication in 1996 of Daniel J. Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. To mark the occasion, Central European History (CEH) has invited a group of seven specialists from Australia, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States to comment on the nature, stakes, and legacies of the two controversies, which attracted a great deal of both scholarly and popular attention at the time. To set the stage, the following introduction provides a brief overview of the two debates, followed by some personal reflections. But first a few words about the participants in the forum, who are, in alphabetical order: Gerrit Dworok, a young German scholar who has recently published a book-length study titled “Historikerstreit” und Nationswerdung: Ursprünge und Deutung eines bundesrepublika- nischen Konflikts (2015); Richard J. Evans, a foremost scholar of modern German history and the author of a highly acclaimed, three-volume study of the Third Reich (2003-2008), as well as of a study of the Historikerstreit itself (In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past [1989]); Mary Fulbrook, a leading historian of modern Germany, especially of the German Democratic Republic, who has more recently turned her attention to National Socialism and its legacies with the publication of A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012), and Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution (forthcoming); Wendy Lower, the author of several important books on the so-called final solution, including Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013), as well as the acting director of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; 375 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 02 Oct 2021 at 12:44:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938917000826 376 Forum on the Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen Debate A. Dirk Moses, the author of a prize-winning study on the way in which West German intellectuals dealt with the legacy of the Third Reich (German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past [2007]), as well as of numerous publications since then about memory and genocide within but also beyond the German context; Jeffrey K. Olick, a prolific sociologist and historian who has written extensively on col- lective memory, especially within the postwar German context (most recently, The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method [2016]); Timothy D. Snyder, a renowned historian of Eastern Europe who has written two volumes specifically dealing with the Holocaust, both of which, besides appearing in dozens of translations, have received a great deal of popular attention beyond academe (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin [2010], and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning [2015]). ∗∗∗ The Historikerstreit erupted in July 1986 with the publication of an essay in the leading West German weekly Die Zeit by renowned sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The lengthy piece was a critical response to an article that historian and philosopher Ernst Nolte had published a month earlier in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (“Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will”), and to a short book released earlier that year by historian Andreas Hillgruber (Zweierlei Untergang. Die Zerschlagung des deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums). The sharp exchange prompted a series of heated, sometimes vit- riolic responses by Nolte, Habermas, and Hillgruber, as well as by other prominent West German historians, political scientists, and journalists, including Rudolf Augstein, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Martin Broszat, Joachim Fest, Klaus Hildebrand, Eberhard Jäckel, Jürgen Kocka, Hans and Wolfgang Mommsen, Michael Stürmer, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and Heinrich August Winkler (in retrospect, the absence of female scholars involved in the fray is striking).1 Carried out in the pages of the national press in the form of articles and letters-to-the- editor, the debate centered on the nature of National Socialism and on its meaning and significance for contemporary (West) Germans, and seemed to pit, roughly speaking, the “conservative” right against the “progressive” left (terms that fail to capture the complexity of the positions presented on both sides). One of the main issues concerned the singularity of the Holocaust, with Nolte and others arguing that it was (and needed to be interpreted as) just one in a long series of state-sponsored atrocities that had punctuated the modern era, especially over the course of the twentieth century. An equally important point of conten- tion was Nolte’s controversial claim that Nazi crimes had been a response to the perceived threat of Bolshevism in the East—“that the so-called annihilation of the Jews by the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original.”2 Hillgruber, for his part, was criticized (among other things) for his sympathetic portrayal in Zweierlei 1Most of the key early texts were reprinted in “Historikerstreit”: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der national-sozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1987); this appeared in English translation as Forever In the Shadow of Hitler? Original documents of the Historikerstreit, the controversy concerning the singularity of the Holocaust, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1993). Also see Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang. Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (Berlin: Corso bei Siedler, 1986). 2Forever in the Shadow of Hitler, 14. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 02 Oct 2021 at 12:44:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938917000826 Forum on the Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen Debate 377 Untergang of German soldiers fighting against the Soviet army in the East during the final stages of World War II. Rightly or wrongly, Habermas and other critics condemned Nolte, Hillgruber, and their supporters for trying to “trivialize” or “relativize” National Socialist crimes and, above all, the final solution—a topic that had become a source of intense interest and popular fascination in the Federal Republic, especially following the broadcast on West German television of the American miniseries Holocaust in early 1979. Ten years—and German unification—separated the Historikerstreit from the Goldhagen “affair,” which some observers characterized as a continuation of the earlier dispute. The publication of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners was a major media event, especially in Germany, where its deceptively simple—his detractors claimed simplistic— explanation for the Holocaust touched off a firestorm of criticism in the media and in aca- demic circles. According to Goldhagen, most Germans had willingly gone along with Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews because of an especially virulent strain of what he termed “elimination antisemitism,” which had supposedly been festering in the German- speaking lands for centuries. Though frequently identified in the press as a historian, Goldhagen had been trained as a political scientist—an important distinction, I believe, given his focus on a single variable to explain a highly complex event. In any event, Goldhagen was highly critical of other scholars working in the field, especially of Christopher Browning, whose highly acclaimed book, Ordinary Germans: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, had appeared four years earlier. Both studies focused on the brutal actions of paramilitary units involved in the mass killing of Jewish civil- ians following Germany’s invasion of Eastern Europe. But they differed drastically when it came to explaining the motivation of the “ordinary” Germans who made up these mobile killing units, with Goldhagen harshly criticizing Browning (and others) for suppos- edly neglecting the key role that antisemitism had played in the process.3 Most historians (this time regardless of their political affinities) roundly rejected Goldhagen’s thesis, but a number of prominent German journalists and public intellectuals, such as Volker Ulrich of Die Zeit, as well as many young Germans, eagerly embraced it—as well as the young and charismatic American political scientist himself. The German public flocked to see him, in fact, during a subsequent book tour across Germany that included (often televised) speaking engagements and public debates with prominent German scholars. In 1997, Goldhagen even received the Democracy Prize
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